365 meters under Detroit hides a salt mine the size of an entire city (8 photos)

Now Detroit has been hit hard by the recession, but once upon a time under its streets a very large industry flourished - a huge salt mine with an area of ​​6 km² with 15 kilometers of roads. She belonged Detroit Salt and Manufacturing Company, which closed in 1983 due to falling salt prices. Previously, tourists were allowed into the mine, but now it's only open to delivery trucks - but what are they deliver and how did the mine appear?





About 400 million years ago there was a piece of land that now called the Michigan Basin. This area is separated from ocean, but continued to fall lower and lower into the ground. Because the the site continued to sink, salt water from the ocean poured inward along as the ocean receded. When the ocean water evaporated, huge deposits of salt.



Over hundreds of thousands of years, the Niagara Escarpment was formed - a large basalt rock mass that covered most of the earth, including the entire state of Michigan. In fact, this rock buried a salt mine on depth of 365 meters underground. According to some estimates, these mines there are 71 trillion tons of salt. Despite the fact that currently salt is not a particularly valuable commodity, it once was. For example, a long time ago in China, salt coins were used for calculations, and in Mediterranean - salt cakes. Even the Romans paid their soldiers salt.





When salt was discovered near Detroit in 1895, everyone was in delighted. The Detroit Salt and Manufacturing Company came into existence on 11 years later, in 1906, and decided to dig a mine. Company in progress went bankrupt due to the high cost of the project, and many workers died, but she didn't stop trying. In 1910, the company completed drilling mines with a depth of 323 meters and began work on the second salt layer. The company was then acquired by the Watkins Salt Company. Shortly after completion work, the new company increased its productivity and the purity of the salt and already by 1914 was producing about 8,000 tons of rock salt every month.



International Salt Company, bought the mine from Watkins Salt Company and decided to further increase productivity. Company hired more people and used better equipment, including electricity, locomotives and mechanical excavators. Second mine decided to build in 1922 and finished it in 1925, which increased capacity of the mine, and also reduced the time spent on lifting the salt by surface.



Mining salt, of course, was still not easy. Even in In modern conditions, underground mining is not an easy job, so you can only imagine how hard this work was in the 1900s. AT mine decided to start using donkeys, but because of the conditions, many of them died an untimely death. Equipment used underground, often remained there - it was too difficult to drag back through a narrow shaft opening measuring 1.8 by 1.8 meters.



The mine also had positive aspects - it was clean, and there there were no rodents at all. Miner Joel Payton recalled: "One of the reasons that we don't have rats in our mine in Detroit is that the rats have nothing to eat there, except for the remnants of our dinner. And by the way, in our the mine is not only free of rats, cockroaches and other living creatures, but also the remains living beings of past ages.



Work in the salt mines of Detroit continued until 1983, when salt ceased to be a profitable business. The mine was not used until 1987, and then it was bought by the Detroit Salt Company LLC, which again began to produce salt in 1988 to the present. True, now it is not table salt that is mined in the mine, but road salt, which used in the harsh Michigan winters.